Category Archives: Adobe InDesign

If you’ve watched much science fiction, you know things always go wrong in time travel. Somebody drops a USB drive in ancient Mesopotamia, and next thing you know, dinosaurs are roaming the streets of New York.

Same thing goes for back-saving files for earlier versions of software; I always caution designers to avoid this if possible. However, I realize that designers often encounter mixed versions of applications, especially when freelancers are involved. I try to always keep files in their native habitat, in terms of software version and platform. The notion of opening up an innocent PC Illustrator CS5 file in a Mac CS4 version of Illustrator makes me twitch.

I’ve had my convictions strengthened this week; I’m working on a book in InDesign CS5, but the publisher wants the final files in InDesign CS4. I’m taking advantage of the Track Changes feature in CS5 to work with the editor, and that’s working great. However, when I export to InDesign Markup (IDML) — the only way back to CS4 — things fall apart. Paragraph formatting goes wonky. Styles based on other styles have forgotten the overrides that separated them from the parent styles, and the original formatting (mainly nested styles that I’d un-nested) bubbles back up. Like a zombie movie.

I don’t recall this happening when I back-saved from InDesign CS4 to CS3. I don’t know if I was lucky, or if back-saves have become more dangerous in the new version. The moral of the story? If you are forced to time-travel, make a PDF before you jump. Place the PDF in a separate layer in the converted file, and turn its visibility off and on, so you can check for issues.

If you’ve used the built-in contact sheet generator in Adobe Bridge, you know it only gives you the option to generate PDFs (or Web galleries). That’s nice — but there’s a much better way.

I’ve blogged in the past about Bob Stucky’s great scripting solution, which enables you to invoke InDesign from within Bridge, in order to generate a truly editable InDesign contact sheet.

I’m tickled to announce that Bob has updated the script for CS5, and it’s even better than before. You can now include your Bridge ratings (in color!), and create separate masters for the first page and the remainder of the document. You can completely customize a template and invoke it when you create the contact sheet. It’s quick, it’s slick, it’s really trick (and I love it).

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JUST TO CLARIFY: This is only true for images in which the first layer comp hides some effects (aka layer styles). If the first layer comp only involves hiding some layers, without hiding any effects, all is well. It’s not a showstopper (once you know about it) — it’s just One Of Those Things. This advice applies whether you’re using the image as button artwork, or just as static artwork in the InDesign document.

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When you’re building complex Photoshop files, Layer Comps are a great way to store the visibility of layers that constitute versions of the image. For example, if Layers 1, 3, and 5 are Version A, Layers 2, 4, and 6 are Version B, and Layers 7, 8, and 9 are Version C, you can create three layer comps that let you access each version of the image with a single click. A Layer Comp can also store the position of layers, as well as the visibility of Layer Styles (such as drop shadows, inner glows, bevel & emboss, etc.). Layer Comps make it easy to keep track of versions while you’re experimenting, and when you want to quickly show a client those versions without trying to remember which eyeballs to turn on/off. 😉

Layer Comps can also be invoked by InDesign’s Object Layer Options feature, to control the visibility of layers and effect in placed PSD files; this is especially handy when you’re creating different appearances for interactive buttons. It was while creating buttons that I discovered a bug in the way InDesign handles Layer Comps. If you use Object Layer Options to manually turn layers off and on, all is well. My images had just one layer, but multiple effects (aka fx, aka Layer Styles) applied to the single layer. So I couldn’t invoke separate layers in InDesign, and had to rely on Layer Comps to control the visibility of effects that constituted each version of the button art.

I discovered that, unless you have the first Layer Comp in the Layer Comps panel list selected when you save the file out of Photoshop, you’ll never be able to reveal that first Layer Comp in InDesign. It allows you to select the Layer Comp, but ignores its settings and instead displays the layer comp that was selected when you saved the file. So you can never invoke the first layer comp in InDesign, unless it’s the selected comp when the image is saved.

As you can see in the image above, the first layer comp should just be the plain green text. But InDesign displayed the “Add Rocks” layer comp when I invoked the plain green text comp. Aaarghh (and, of course, it was late at night).

Moral of the story? If you’re relying on Layer Comps in InDesign, make sure the first layer comp in the Layer Comps panel is selected when you save the image, even if you think you won’t use it. It’ll save you the confusion and frustration that had me banging my head on the keyboard at midnight!

Don’t you just love the tabbed document display in Creative Suite 4 applications?

If you do, you’re in the minority, judging by the number of people who ask “How do I change that?” often followed by “What were they thinking?!” I can help a bit with the first question, but I can’t answer the second one. I guess it’s part of the increasing Macromediafication of the application interfaces: perhaps the flat gray architecture is meant to be chic and soothing, and maybe the tabs are intended to conserve screen real estate. Whatever the explanation, here are some tips for returning to the Land of Floating Windows, as nature intended.

Photoshop

Open Preferences > Interface. UNcheck “Open Documents as Tabs” and “Enable Floating Window Docking.” If you just uncheck “Open Documents as Tabs,” document windows will still insist on docking if they’re dragged near each other.

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InDesign

As in Photoshop, open Preferences > Interface and uncheck “Open Documents as Tabs” and “Enable Floating Window Docking.” Heave great sigh of relief.

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Illustrator

Alas, Illustrator only lets you get halfway there: You can turn off the option to open documents as tabs, but you can’t prevent documents from docking if you move them too close together. Some strange magnetic force compels them to huddle together for warmth.

Illustrator offers no option to prevent documents from docking to each other once they’re open. Bummer.

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Feature Requests

Here’s an idea: if you dislike the tabbed interface, put a note in the suggestion box. Fill out the Feature Request form on the Adobe website and ask that this compulsive behavior be an option, not the default.

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If you have to import Microsoft Word files and map Word styles to InDesign styles, here’s some good news. Although the option to save style mappings as presets was first offered in InDesign CS3, it didn’t work in CS4. The preset name was saved—but it was empty!

Before you freak out, it’s not a common circumstance, nor is it a showstopper. Just thought you might like to know. Here’s the equation:

Place a layered PSD as an anchored object within a headerorfooter row in a multi-page threaded table, and then attempt to print to a PostScript printer. The job starts to print, then displays the above error dialog: “The Adobe Print Engine has failed to output your data due to an unknown problem.” Continue reading →

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The Smart Text Reflow feature in InDesign is quite useful: if you add more text to a multi-page story, new pages are generated at the end of the story, avoiding overset text. It’s on by default: you can turn it off, or you can modify the preferences so that Smart Text Reflow applies not just to master text frames. It can be a runaway train, but usually it’s an asset.

However, I’ve discovered an odd (and rare) bug with Smart Text Reflow. You’ll only encounter it under specific circumstances, if you perform the steps in a particular order. It happened to me while teaching an InDesign class, and it took some time to figure out that Smart Text Reflow was the culprit. I thought I’d spare you the aggravation by describing the problem so you can avoid it: Continue reading →

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Productivity can be cool: InDesign CS3 and CS4 allow you to select multiple files in the File>Place dialog, and this is a great way to get multiple text and graphics files into the page quickly.

But did you know you can shop among multiple folders as you’re gathering up files to place in the page? You can, but there’s a little trick required.

If you choose File>Place, select some files in a directory, then switch directories and select more files, you’ll only pick up the latest group of files — earlier selections are ignored.

But if you select files from one folder, then return to InDesign without clicking in the page, you can choose File>Place again, and gather up another bunch of files. When you return to InDesign, you’re carrying all the files you selected from all visited directories.

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My thanks to Bob Bringhurst of Adobe Systems for adding a comment to the earlier post. I thought it deserved its own post, since he was kind enough to share: Bob’s blog post is here.

In the circumstance that prompted my earlier post, a customer needs to add a TOC to the first page of their multi-page InDesign files in order to generate bookmarks in the exported PDFs. That’s the only purpose the TOC serves. For various reasons having to do with workflow and tracking, they can’t add an extra page (this is a retail environment, and they’re using multiple pages to hold multiple versions).

The solution is a bit of a kludge, but it works: they create the TOC, and then position the TOC text frame in the pasteboard, overlapping the left edge of the page by just a skosh. The text itself is off in the pasteboard, and doesn’t appear in the page when the PDF is generated.

There’s (almost) always a way 🙂

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If you generate a Table of Contents in a file (or book) in InDesign, hyperlinked bookmarks are automatically generated when you export to PDF with Hyperlinks and Bookmarks options checked in the export dialog. Bookmarks make it easy for readers of the PDF to find information quickly: displayed in the Navigation pane in Acrobat or Reader, they serve as a dynamic table of contents that’s always available.

Sometimes I want the bookmarks in the PDF, but without a visible table o’contents in the file. In the past, I’ve generated my TOC in InDesign, but put it in the pasteboard. The text isn’t visible in the PDF, but the bookmarks are created.

Today I discovered that this trick doesn’t work in InDesign CS4! Instead, the TOC text frame has to have at least an edge hanging into a document page for the bookmarks to be created. While this isn’t fatal, it’s weird that the functionality has changed.